The idea of clearing the land for the cannery ‘at one boom’ was thrilling to Leon. He’d borne painful witness to the slow progress of an arm of the Savage Road towards the cannery site and to the arduous attempts to cut down the mangroves, resulting in a river choked with trunks and branches and the Sadong obstinately flowing round them, to colonise yet more ground. Leon had a vision of all this miraculously gone and tracts of land made level and stable, ready for the canning sheds and the steam-powered rolling belts that would lift the fish from the water.

Scaife, a man in his fifties, had a bluntness of speech and manner which was inimical to the rajah. Sir Ralph noticed that Scaife was especially curt and rude to Leon, treating him as a person of no account, and this caused the rajah intense agony, knowing that he was unable to explain to a disagreeable engineer from the English North what Leon’s true status was in his household without risking the man’s immediate departure.

Scaife had presumed that he would be lodged in Sir Ralph’s great palace, and he spent his first night there, but when he returned from a day’s survey at the Sadong, he found all his possessions gone from the room where he’d slept the previous night. At a loss, and with his trembling hand suffering uncontrollable agitation, the engineer walked round and round the big house – both awed and disgusted by its opulence – in search of the man who had promised him a quantity of silver, but who had appeared displeased with him on sight. But he could not find him. Eventually, he was shown by one of the Chinese houseboys to a ‘cottage’ in the grounds, a place built of wood and palm thatch by the rajah with the foreknowledge that only certain guests would fit in with his aesthetic choices up at the great house, and that the others would have to be banished to this simple dwelling.

Scaife found a pile of mats for sleeping on, a table furnished with paper and ink, a commode, a jug and ewer, and a quantity of rushlights. A bevy of green parakeets snickered in the banana trees outside the cottage window. He thought all of this woeful. At the Muslim rajah’s palace, he had slept in a tented goosefeather bed, in a large, quiet room, in which the oldest of the rajah’s concubines had been ‘on loan’ to him during his visit. He had been treated with respect. His nights had been scented and rude.

Now, he saw that his status had fallen. Septimus Scaife was a man who, since his unfortunate accident, which had imbued him with a great store of self-pity, was quick to make enemies, and when he took in the amenities offered by the cottage, a violent loathing of Sir Ralph and of his ‘henchman’ Leon took possession of him. Sitting glumly on the pile of mats, he began to wonder how, while fulfilling his duties sufficiently well to earn him the promised silver, he might sabotage the project and bring ruin to men he deemed venal and lazy, living a rich life they had not deserved.